Oprah Running For President?

Last night, Oprah delivered a rousing speech at the Golden Globes Awards that got millions of Oprah fans and onlookers tweeting and talking last night.

And the multi-media Queen also has folks wondering if Oprah’s speech was the opening speech to a presidential campaign for 2020.

Oprah was in the house to accept the Cecil B. DeMille Award. In a wide-ranging speech that specifically touched on race and gender, Oprah spoke about seeing Sidney Poitier becoming the first Black man to win an Academy Award in1964, and being inspired by the symbolic importance of it:

I remember his tie was white, and of course his skin was black, and I had never seen a black man being celebrated like that. I tried many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door bone tired from cleaning other people’s houses. But all I can do is quote and say that the explanation in Sidney’s performance in “Lilies of the Field”:
“Amen, amen, amen, amen.”

Oprah went on to speak about Recy Taylor, a Black Alabama woman who was kidnapped and raped, after leaving a church service, by a gang of White men in 1944. At the height of Jim Crow, Ms. Taylor’s case was never prosecuted. Recy died last month.

Oprah added that “time is up” for men who abuse women:

Their time is up. And I just hope — I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on. It was somewhere in Rosa Parks’ heart almost 11 years later, when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, and it’s here with every woman who chooses to say, “Me too.” And every man — every man who chooses to listen.

Oprah could be a game-changing candidate if she were to enter the presidential contest. Most of her political views are a mystery, but it might not even matter because of the magnitude of Oprah’s celebrity and status as a transformational, living legend.

And though she hasn’t been clear about it, Oprah is widely assumed to be a Democrat.

Her endorsement of Barack Obama in 2007 is thought to have helped pave his way to the White House.

She could also potentially raise tons of money–a necessity in modern politics–and could tap into her own mountain of cash, if necessary.

Her longtime boo, Stedman Graham, said Oprah is leaning toward it:

“It’s up to the people,” Graham told the Los Angeles Times. “She would absolutely do it.”